On the last day of E3 LucasArts finally opened up their exclusive booth to the expo attendees, that did not have previous appointments, and after a short wait in line I was able to catch a glimpse of the new Indiana Jones title being developed for the Xbox 360.
The new Indiana Jones game (untitled as of yet) will be set in the 1930′s and will take place in San Francisco among other places around the world. Lucas himself is overseeing the story for the game. The crown jewel of the game though is its use of the euphoria behavioral-simulation engine, developed by NaturalMotion Ltd. Euphoria allows for interactive characters and unscripted events.
Enemies and characters will now work to protect, balance, and shield themselves depending on the situation. The environment in the game is also unscripted. In the playable demo, Indiana punched an enemy into a
wooden door and the planks broke individually and in different places. The game was then reloaded to show how the door broke differently the second time around. In another scene Indiana was riding on top of a
trolley car in one of the games several chase scenes. The LucasArts employee showed how the cars following him were not on tracks and that the AI was driving them in real time, swerving to avoid obstacles that
also presented themselves in real time. Bad guys atop the trolley would also try desperately not to get themselves thrown off and if they did happen to be tossed off by the illustrious Dr. Jones, they would either
tuck and roll to avoid injury, or they would grab on to the edges and rails of the trolley in a last ditch effort to survive and rejoin the fight.
The LucasArts team is able to incorporate all if these advances into their game because they are now working alongside both LucasFilm Ltd. and Industrial Light and Magic. Innovative technological advances that were developed in the film industry are now being put to use in this next-gen game. So, because of the collaborative efforts taking place, scenes and levels in the game that would take other developers months to render can now be done in just weeks or even days. Still, we will have to wait until the later half of 2007 before we can enjoy this new adventure. Overall, I was thoroughly impressed and I was happy to see that Nintendo isn’t the only company out there that is pushing the limits on gameplay and innovation.
